Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Spread to other countries

The epidemic reached the public spotlight in February 2003, when an American businessman travelling from China came down with pneumonia-like symptoms while on a flight to Singapore. The plane had to stop at Hanoi, Vietnam, where the victim died in a hospital. Several of the doctors and nurses who had attempted to treat him soon came down with the same disease despite basic hospital procedures. Several of them died. The virulence of the symptoms and the infection of hospital staff alarmed global health authorities fearful of another emergent pneumonia epidemic. On March 12, 2003, the WHO issued a global alert, followed by a health alert by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Related Topics:
Singapore - March 12 - Global alert - United States - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Local transmission of SARS took place in Toronto, Singapore, Hanoi, Taiwan, the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Shanxi, and the Chinese Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong the first cohort of affected people were discharged from the hospital on March 29 2003. The disease spread in Hong Kong from a mainland doctor on the 9th floor of Metropole Hotel in Kowloon Peninsula, infecting 16 of the hotel visitors. Those visitors travelled to Singapore and Toronto, spreading SARS to those locations.

Related Topics:
Toronto - Singapore - Hanoi - Taiwan - Chinese province - Guangdong - Shanxi - Special Administrative Region - Hong Kong - March 29 - 2003

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The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced in early April their belief that a strain of coronavirus, possibly a strain never seen before in humans, is the infectious agent responsible for the spread of SARS. http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/04/04/3e8e038cec7b6 Disease transmission is currently not well understood. It is suspected to spread via inhalation of droplets expelled by an infected person when coughing or sneezing, or possibly via contact with secretions on objects. Health authorities are also investigating the possibility that it may be airborne, which would increase the potential contagiousness of the disease.

Related Topics:
Centers for Disease Control - Coronavirus - Cough - Sneezing

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The chances that SARS-infected people could be "asymptomatic," meaning that carriers could be infectious without developing any of the tell-tale signs and hence move around within a population undetected, are small, WHO officials said. "If asymptomatic carriers were playing an important role we would see it by now," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson told Reuters in April of 2004.

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